Harlem Renaissance
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Where Music Truly Began
The Renaissance Fair is in town this week. Its a large fun carnival type event where every person can go and play games while they learn about the European Renaissance that happened several 100s of years ago. But what ever happened with the other Renaissances? Most of them were used to lay down several basic foundations for our society and then drifted off out of our memory. One such Renaissance was the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance created and influenced some of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Zora Neale Hurston was one of these great minds. She wrote several outstanding plays and novels and helped share the unspoken point of view of several thousands of people. Her works helped to remind us of how great an effect the Harlem Renaissance had on our history. The Harlem Renaissance incorporated new ideas and arts from the African American culture into the broader spectrum of American culture. Of these arts and artists were the distinguished Zora Neale Hurston, her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and one of the greatest musicians to ever have lived, Mr. Louis Armstrong.
As a child, Hurston was born on 1891 in Notalsuga, Alabama but quickly moved and spent the remainder of her childhood in Eatonville, Florida. When Hurston turned of the age 13, her mother passed away leaving her father with two options, raise her himself or send her off to private school. After a brief study at Howard University, Hurston spent the remainder of her college life at Barnard College where she earned her Bachelors of Arts degree in anthropology. Hurstons writing style was focused largely on her studies of anthropology where she focused upon the ethnography of the African American people. Ethnography is defined such as, “The ethnographer, in [James] Cliffords sense, rather than describing and attempting to explain the unfamiliar, reexamines assumptions about the familiar (Hill 36). Hurston understood this concept and decided to become familiar with “the familiar” and “the unfamiliar.” To complete this task, Hurston set out to southern black areas and studied social subjects such as Hoodoo in New Orleans. By understanding the entire African American race instead of just those in Harlem, Hurston could grasp an entire races voice into literature.
After finishing her studies, Hurston created her own theories about the stereotypes of the African American. These theories were considered that, “Hurston attempts to debunk the stereotype that African-Americans adapt to social circumstances by mimicking white-American norms of behavior. Her theory of imitation mocks social scientific explanations of cultural diffusion and assimilation” (37). Hurston was simply surprised at her findings. The African American race had not diffused from and learned everything they knew from the white race. No. The African American race had created its own American culture whose beginnings came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Hurston found that her work most definitely affected the African American race. Her work was seen as that, “Hurston offers clear evidence, for she had a very complex and conflictual picture of her race. Hurston sees Negroness first as a material fact of course involving marked social prejudice which it was in her interest and in her capacity to transcend” (Awkward 99). The molding of the African American culture came from something much higher than just the racism that the African American community was subject to. It came from the being of a coarse beginning all the way into the Harlem Renaissance which Hurston saw fit to show the public. Hurstons writing has been described as, “Although she [Hurston] does not use collage or concentrate on grotesque imager, she employs shock techniques, an approach that Clifford argues is the ethnographers provenance in efforts to make primitive culture not merely comprehensible but recognizable to the mind of civilized man” (Hill 36). Each technique or form of writing that Hurston used helped integrate the social cultures of traditional America with those of the Harlem Renaissance. Every writing, whether it be of colloquial language or economic status, was used to help show that the protagonist of each culture is every person in that culture. The point that was proven was that each person in society helps to make that culture what it is. Hurston decided to use her tactful writing to help not only whites or blacks, but every person to understand the importance of the Harlem Renaissance. “Overall, Hurstons contributions to the Negro anthology can be seen as an experiment with form, a residual outcome of her efforts during the early 1930s to publish the results of her field research for an academic audience” (30). All of Hurstons writings and creations showed the public the true African American culture through African American eyes. Hurston put the reader into the negroness of her characters.
Based largely off of Negroness, one of Hurstons most widely acknowledged works is her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Their Eyes is set in Eatonville, Florida during the early 20th century. The novel follows a young African American woman, Janie, through her three different marriages and the hardships that she overcame with each one. “As Janie tells and retells her story, she also moves a cross boundaries into spaces traditionally occupied by and for men, spaces that define individual freedom and personal independence for one who dares to think, speak, act, and accept responsibility for her actions” (Lester 80). Hurston uses Their Eyes to further evict the stereotypes that not only African American women, but all women are forced to succumb to. Janie learns to defend her self, but more importantly learns to defend her ideals such as that marriage must be of love. Also Janie accepts every decision she has acted upon no matter what the prejudice she received from her townspeople. Janies story has been described as, “Writ large, Janies story reflects efforts by black women, writing and speaking their lives, to liberate themselves and all black people from the oppression of race and sex through the power of language and the struggle to own their history” (Awkward 55). This struggle through oppression is the breaking stone that allowed the Harlem Renaissance to grow.
The story that Hurston creates in Their Eyes is a compilation of elements from the Harlem Renaissance. Her ability to show this has been told such as, “She also observes that the structure of the story, especially considering the role of Janies friend as chorus/audience, enables